“Hmm. Mmm…”
Asahina was sitting at the table, wearing (for once) her school uniform, as well as a dire expression.
At this point, she hadn’t yet completed her picture-bookish illustrations, so all I could see was her leaning her head over the table as she frantically moved her pencil over the paper. I had no choice but to make my own tea.
Next to her, Nagato was maintaining her usual appearance. She was like a posed doll, sitting there with a hardback book open in front of her, giving off the sense of having completed her task.
“…”
Perhaps having decided that, having turned in three short stories, her duty was finished, Nagato had returned to her usual self. The invisible aura that had emanated from her during the meeting with the student council was like a lie.
Speaking of lies, I can honestly confess that I’d be lying if I claimed not to have been worried about Nagato. There were a million questions I wanted to ask her—what had she been feeling that had led her to write such strange stories? Did she think nothing of showing them to Haruhi? What did they mean, anyway? Would she mind writing some annotations? But I couldn’t very well ask these questions in front of Asahina and Koizumi.
I’d just have to seize the opportunity the next time we were alone.
I took my eyes off of the book-reading literature club member, who’d returned to her normal expressionless mode. There were two computers running on the table; Nagato’s machine had been set aside and closed as tightly as its master’s lips.
I wanted to do the same thing, if I could. The guilt of wasting the planet’s precious and limited resources assaulted me, and I wanted to turn the laptop’s switch to the “off” position immediately. Leaving it on would only waste more energy, and while I was turning things off, I wanted to turn off my own brain as well and go into a deep sleep.
As such thoughts ran through my head, I sighed. Koizumi spoke up.
“You need not overthink things so much. Just write things how they are.”
Easy for him to say, since he could just write stuff that was already in his head. I had to think of everything from scratch. Maybe he should just tell me his own romantic experiences, I said. I’d write him a lovely tale with him as the protagonist.
“I’ll pass on that, thanks.” Koizumi paused his touch-typing and regarded me with an inquisitive smile. Then, in a small voice: “You really have nothing? Have you never been captive to feelings of love, or even gone out with a girl? If nothing like that has happened this first year at this school—or nothing you can write about, I suppose I should say—what about before that? In middle school?”
I looked up at the ceiling and pondered my own memories. Koizumi’s voice got even quieter.
“Do you remember what I told you at the baseball game?”
He was always talking about all kinds of stuff, I said, so I couldn’t be bothered to remember every detail of every line he’d spoken.
“I should think you’d remember me telling you that you were batting fourth in the order because Haruhi wished it so.”
I suspiciously looked at Koizumi’s gentle smile. This again, eh?
“Yes, this again. It is no coincidence that you were the one to draw ‘love story.’ ”
I’d been plenty suspicious about the randomness of lotteries for a while now. I knew full well that you didn’t have to be a master of sleight-of-hand to make them turn out the way you wanted.
I glanced at Nagato, who did not particularly seem to be eavesdropping. Asahina had her hands full with her new best friends, Mssrs. Pencil and Eraser.
“In other words, Suzumiya wants to know about your past romantic history. That’s why you got the love story genre. The fact that the assignment wasn’t a ‘memoir of your romantic experience’ is proof that Suzumiya herself is a bit hesitant.”
I didn’t think there was a hesitant thing about her, I said. She always came barging straight in to whatever she did, without any restraint or even so much as a “Hi, how are you.”
Koizumi smiled thinly. “I am speaking of her heart. Despite her exterior, Suzumiya is well aware of where that fine line is drawn. It may be an unconscious sense, which would make it all the more impressive for its keenness. In reality, she has never once done anything that would trample on any one of our hearts. Certainly not to me, anyway. On the other hand, I’ve only briefly been allowed to enter Suzumiya’s psyche.”
Come to think of it, I’d only been there twice myself. “I’m still convinced she’s a girl without any sense of restraint, though,” I finally managed to reply. “Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to do stuff like kicking the student council door open or hijacking the literature club. Or making me write crap like this, to be honest.”
“And so what if she is? It’s fun in its own way, is it not? The few students of an underdog club, going up against the might of the student council…” Koizumi’s pleasant gaze grew unpleasantly distant for a moment, but he soon regained his smile. “To be honest, I dreamed of having a school life like this. More and more, I acknowledge Suzumiya as a god, and I feel I want to worship her—because she’s made my dream come true.”
More like he was acting in his own play, I said. Dream come true, my ass—he was pulling the strings from behind the scenes. I’d acknowledge his effort, but that was all.
“Ah, but I would never try to manipulate which assignment you drew. Let’s get back to the real subject. To put it simply, Suzumiya wants you to write something about your views on love. And incidentally, I may as well say that I do as well.” Koizumi’s voice got a bit louder. “From what I’ve heard, there was a girl you got along quite well with in middle school. What about writing something about that episode?”
How many times did I have to say it? That wasn’t that kind of story.
I furrowed my brow and massaged my temples, sneaking a look at the faces of the other two occupants of the room.
Asahina was focusing solely on the completion of her illustrated fairy tale, and it didn’t seem like a word of our conversation had reached her ears.
As for Nagato—
She, too, seemed to be wholly concentrating on reading her book, but while I had no way of knowing how sensitive her ears were, I had my doubts as to whether it was possible to speak so quietly that she couldn’t hear.
Anyway, why was I assaulted by this guilty feeling? Why had Kunikida, Nakagawa, and the rest of my middle school classmates all come to this mistaken conclusion? It was a mystery.
“I have no intention of writing that story,” I said flatly. Particularly not for the satisfaction of anyone’s curiosity, and definitely not for this smiley-eyed jerk, and—hey, what was up with that “yes, yes, I know” look in his eye? He had it all wrong, I told him. It’s not because it was some memory from my past that I didn’t want to think about. The whole story really just didn’t matter.
“We shall leave it at that, then,” said Koizumi irritatingly, then he moved on immediately to a new suggestion. “In which case, you’ll need to quickly think of a different memory that you can write about. Surely you must have one. A date you went on with someone, or a time when someone admitted they had a crush on you.”
Like hell I did.
My mouth was half opened in the process of telling him so when I stopped. Koizumi noticed and smiled widely. “Ah, so you do! See, there you are. Both Suzumiya and I look forward to hearing the story. Please do write it.”
I wanted to know who’d made him the assistant editor. Didn’t he need to get back to his novelization of the disappearance of Shamisen? I’d decide what to write on my own, thanks very much, I told him.
“Of course, you will be the one to decide. I’m simply an observer, or an adviser at best. Though at the moment I feel more like Suzumiya’s proxy.”
Koizumi shrugged, ending his conversation with me and turning his attention back to his computer.
I started to think.
Sorry, Koizumi—you’ve gotten the wrong idea again. In
his imagination there might be a vision of me in a typical middle school boy-girl relationship, but although I’m not proud of it, no one has ever confessed feelings for me, nor have I to anyone else. My first crush was my older cousin, but she eloped with some worthless guy. I guess it was a little traumatic, but that was a long time ago.
No, indeed—there had been no love confessions, and definitely no dates.
I chuckled as a scene appeared on the insides of my eyelids.
It had been about a year earlier. The middle school graduation ceremony was over, and the scene was from the period just before I’d come to this school. I hadn’t had the slightest inkling that my high school life was going to turn out the way it had, and I was just enjoying my last lazy spring break of middle school.
The tiny episode that had lodged in the cracks of my brain had begun when my little sister had brought the telephone receiver up to my room.
I stared at the ceiling, then sniffed and touched my finger to the laptop’s trackpad.
The screen saver disappeared, replaced by the blank white of the text editor.
I sensed Koizumi grinning irritatingly next to me as I experimentally hit a key.
I was just warming up. If it got boring in the middle, I could easily just delete the whole thing.
Imagining I was panning for gold hidden in the cracks of my memory, I transmitted the sentences down to my fingers that I’d composed in my brain, and I started writing the opening.
It went something like this.
“It was the last bit of the final spring break of middle school, just before I would enter high school…”
It was the last bit of the final spring break of middle school, just before I would enter high school.
Although I had already received my middle school diploma, I was not yet a high school student, and I remember thinking that if I could, I wanted to stay this way forever.
Perhaps thanks to my mother sending me to cram school, I’d passed the entrance exams with a decent score—I was glad it hadn’t been too hard. However, the truth was that when I first went to the school for the preliminary inspection before the exam, the prospect of trudging up and down that hill every day for three years wasn’t a bright one. Incidentally, thanks to the way the school districts worked out, all of my friends from middle school were either going to a neighborhood public school or a far-off private academy, so like it or not, I was feeling pretty lonely.
At the time, I had not the faintest idea that as soon as school started, I’d find myself meeting a strange girl and being added to the membership of a bizarre brigade, so as I thought back over my middle school days and felt uncertain about my upcoming high school life, I was taking this all very seriously.
So it was that loneliness had taken over the greater part of my heart, so I amused myself by sleeping in until close to noon, going to farewell parties for my friends who were going on to other schools (parties that were really just video game tournaments), occasionally seeing random movies—but before long I got bored with all this, so after having a combination breakfast and lunch, I whiled away that random late-March afternoon lazing around in my room, considering just turning into a cow.
I slept, awoke, ate, and napped again. Eventually, as I lay there on my side, the sound of the house’s landline ringing reached my ears.
There wasn’t an extension in my room, so I just left it for my mom or sister to answer, and sure enough, soon my sister came into my room, bearing the cordless handset.
Thinking back on it, I now get the feeling that every time she comes into my room with the phone, it’s the start of something weird.
However, at the risk of repeating myself, back then I was yet innocent; I had a dire lack of experience points.
“Kyon, phone!” said my sister, beaming.
“Who is it?”
“A girl!”
My sister pushed the phone at me, giggled, then twirled around and skipped merrily back out of my room. That was weird. Normally she’d hang around until I kicked her out. I wondered what had her in such a hurry. But anyway, who could be on the phone? Scrolling through my mental list of faces and trying to find a girl who seemed likely to call me, I punched the answer button on the receiver.
“Hello?”
After a moment, there came, “… Yes, hello. Um…”
It was definitely a girl’s voice. But my search mode hadn’t completed yet, so I didn’t know who it was. It did seem familiar, though.
“It’s me, Miyoko Yoshimura. Is this a good time? If you’re busy…”
“Oh—”
Miyoko Yoshimura? Who was that?
I began to think about it as the scrolling in my head came to a stop. Now I knew why the voice sounded familiar—I’d met her many times. Her use of her full name had tripped me up. Miyoko Yoshimura’s nickname was “Miyokichi.”
“Oh, right. No, I’m not busy at all. I’ve got nothing but time.”
“Oh, good,” she said, sounding relieved.
I felt dubious. What could she possibly want with me?
“Are you free tomorrow? The day after is fine too. But it has to be before April starts. I’d like to borrow a bit of your time.”
“Er, are you asking me?” (*1)
“Yes. I’m sorry it’s so sudden. Tomorrow or the next day. Are you busy?”
“Not at all. I’m totally free both days.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” Her soft voice had an honesty to it that sounded like it came from the bottom of her heart. “I have a favor to ask.” Miyoko continued, her voice sounding a bit nervous. “For tomorrow, just tomorrow, would you go out with me?”
I looked at my open bedroom door as if to chase the shadow of my sister. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“With you?”
“Yes.” She lowered her voice. “Just the two of us would be best. Will it not work out?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” She let out another exaggerated exhalation of relief, then spoke as though she were trying to contain her cheer. “Well, then, I’ll see you!”
I felt like I could see her bowing at the other end of the phone line.
Next she confirmed the time and place of the rendezvous, all the while taking care that it was convenient for me. “Got it,” I finally said.
“I’m sorry to have called so suddenly.”
“No, it’s fine. I wasn’t busy,” I said vaguely to this girl who was evidently determined to be considerate to the end, then hung up. I got the feeling that if I didn’t hang up, there was no telling for how long Miyoko would insist on thanking me. That’s just the kind of girl Miyoko “Miyokichi” Yoshimura was.
I went to return the phone receiver to its place, emerging into the hallway. There I saw my sister waiting, cackling about something. I took the opportunity to push the receiver at her.
“Nyahaha!” She giggled like a maniac, waving the receiver around in the air as she left.
Worrying about my little sister’s future, I thought about the calm, reserved quality of Miyokichi’s voice. (*2)
Then, the next day came.
I don’t have any intention of writing all the details. To put it simply, that’s because it’s a pain. This is a story, not a business report or a ship’s log. And it’s definitely not my personal journal.
Since I’m the writer, I should be able to write whatever I like. And I think I’ll do just that, thanks very much.
When I got to the rendezvous point, I saw Miyokichi’s form as she walked rapidly toward me, having arrived earlier. Once she’d realized I had seen her, she gave me a neat little bow.
“Good morning,” she said in a slight voice, arranging her small purse’s strap on her shoulder and looking up at me, the movement of which caused her braid to sway a bit. She had a pale blue cardigan on over a floral-patterned blouse, along with fitted jeans. Her outfit suited her slim frame nicely.
“Hey,” I said in reply, and looked slowly over the surroundings.<
br />
We were in front of the train station. It was the same location I would come to be very familiar with as the usual meeting place of the SOS Brigade. But at that time, since I had no idea that in a few short months I’d be a member of a bizarre brigade and would be constantly dragged around by a crazy brigade chief bent on world domination, it all looked pretty normal to me. If anyone saw me meeting up with a girl, they wouldn’t have any reason to think anything annoying would happen. It’d never occur to you, would it? (*3)
“Um—” Miyokichi’s fine features seemed a bit nervous. “There’s someplace I’d like to go—would it be all right?”
“Sure.” That’s why I’d shown up, after all. If I hadn’t planned on coming along, I would’ve turned her down the previous day on the phone. And there was no reason for me to refuse her request.
“Thank you.” She really didn’t need to be this polite, but there she was, bowing again. “There’s a movie I would like to see.”
Sure, no problem. I’d even buy her ticket, I said.
“There’s no need for that. I’ll pay for myself, since I’m the one who asked you all the way out here,” she said plainly, then smiled. Is this what they mean when they say “a smile pure as the driven snow”? It was almost too innocent, though in a different way than my little sister’s.
Incidentally, there were no theaters in the area. Miyokichi and I headed back to the station, bought tickets, and got on the train. The film she wanted to see wasn’t playing at the big multiplex; it was a minor indie flick playing only at a small one-screen theater.
As the train swayed, she looked out the window, clutching a town guidebook in her hand. Occasionally, she would seem to remember something and look up at me, then give a quick little bow.
I wasn’t totally silent myself—I made reasonable conversation, but it wasn’t anything worth writing. It was just small talk. I remember talking about where we would be going to school in the spring, or what my little sister was like. (*4)
It was the same way once we arrived at our planned station and walked to the movie theater. She just seemed a little nervous. That nervousness continued all the way up to the ticket booth. (*5)
The Indignation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 7